1. You were trying to go to the library but it took too goddamn long to cross Sheridan.
2. The government was shut down.
3. You were looking for the crepe place in Norris.
4. You got impaled by a biker so now you lie bleeding.
5. You were writing a strongly worded letter to your local congressman.
Growing your own weed is a great way to reduce greenhouse emissions from its transportation!
The Green Cup has begun. Yet another year’s Battle of Champions has kicked off. Who will make SEED the proudest? Who will prove themselves true warriors of conservation? Who is willing to go the longest without flushing their toilet?
Here are Sherman Ave’s 14 tips to show off your raw, feral dominance over all the others on campus.
Time to cry in the shower while listening to Adele again.
It’s the end of May, and with it comes the flowers in bloom, the inconsistent sunlight of the Chicago sky, and the sound of graduation caps being thrown into the air in happy rejoice. This is a good time. This is a happy, carefree time. This is a time of new beginnings and new hopes that OH WAIT A FUCKING SECOND I HAVE TWO 15-PAGE PAPERS DUE NEXT WEEK AND ALL I WANT TO DO IS THROW A FUCKING BONG OUT THE WINDOW.
I’m not over-reacting. Okay, I am.
Follow this list until the Catholic guilt is too much to handle.
1. Read an article about religious sectarian violence on JSTOR
Curse like an Irishman every time Northwestern logs you out.
2. Do an Econometrics problem set
Congratulations! You’re receiving the education that eluded the 1/8th of your ancestors who endured brutal ethnocentrism in the streets of America!
3. Work on your 25-page paper you should have started in mid-February for your research seminar, “Gender and Sexuality during the Irish Potato Famine”
It’s only a matter of time until “Irish Studies” becomes an official major.
Apparently he didn’t appreciate the five-foot pictures of his face in the crowd.
Last Saturday, John Shurna broke Northwestern’s career scoring record, surpassing Billy McKinny‘s 1,900 career points with a three-pointer against Minnesota. Last weekend I set a career personal high score of 18,310 points in BrickBreaker, but nobody made much of a fuss about it.* Or even a t-shirt.
As Northwestern basketball fans are starting to realize, life on the bubble of the NCAA tournament is a lot like what I’m assuming drunk sex with your pledge wife would be like: you hold your breath and hope that everything magically falls into place to bring about a wondrous sensation you’ve never felt before, but you’re really just waiting for something to go horribly awry and inevitably ruin everything you hold dear. There will probably be a lot of crying in the end no matter what.
Welcome to the People's Republic of Evanston
Earlier this week, the FWH, or “Fuckers We Hate” (formally known as the Evanston City Council) recently proposed a 5-cent tax on all paper and plastic bags in the city of Evanston. On campus, this has spawned controversy and inspired impromptu musical performances. Additionally, it has prolonged the FWH’s long-standing tradition of controversial taxes, laws, and ordinances; Evanston has managed to legislate something questionable with approximately the same frequency of Northwestern’s defense allowing a third-down conversion. This proposal leads us to wonder: How would a bag tax impact students?
It seems that for most students, a bag tax would have a minimal effect on their daily lives. Consider the stores in Evanston where we most frequently shop.
CVS
Usually students use CVS when they only need to pick up one item, like crayons or Magnums (I’m not referencing the firearm). Generally, the only time students need a bag to carry their items home would be in the case of what I call “Chaserpalooza” – a quarterly event in which four weeks of Kellogg studies are spent on 35-40 2-liter bottles of CVS brand soda, which, incidentally, tastes like fucking cough syrup. But even this is hardly valid as an argument against the bag tax; we here at The Ave know that the only real chaser you need is the palm of your hand.
Do 7/11 Taquitos go well with rum?
7/11
Let’s be honest. The guy who works the register at Sevy Levy (shout-out to Dijay) is undoubtedly stoned out of his mind every minute of every day. I’ve gone there at least five or ten times when he’s explicitly requested that I don’t pay the sales tax. The older guy who works there could attempt to prevent that, but he’s usually too busy singing “Moves Like Jagger.” The point is: Given the 7/11 staff, it seems implausible that a bag tax would actually be implemented at that store. But damn, do I love those employees.
EV1
Just as no student enters Ev1 without a backpack, no student leaves Ev1 with a paper bag. That would look suspicious. Instead, we choose to stuff our small backpacks with our four newly bought handles of Smirnoff and take to the streets of Evanston. That way, we get to maximize the number of awkward encounters we get to have with professors, TAs, and friends’ parents on the walk back to campus when there are clearly multiple conspicuous protruding objects clanging loudly in our bags.
A box of clementines for only $15!? WHAT A STEAL!
Whole Foods
If you shop regularly at Whole Foods, it is quite improbable that a 5-cent bag tax would be a financial burden, and it is even less probable that you would ever conceive of opposing an environmental measure.
We can conclude that a bag tax would not have adverse effects on the majority of the student body. This seems especially bizarre, considering that this ordinance was proposed by the Evanston City Council. And it doesn’t negatively affect the Northwestern student body. Am I missing something? Is there a hidden clause that taxes the verbalization of the word “blowjob?” Did Morty finally kill off the Death Eaters that had penetrated the city council? Only time shall tell how the Evanston City Council has secretly designed this law to completely fuck us.
When someone uses the phrase “historical figure” you can usually make two assumptions. First, that the person is probably complaining about a paper they have to write (complaining makes everything better); and second, that the “historical figure” in question is probably dead.
We only tend to refer to people as “historical figures” if they’ve been dead for at least half a century or so (sorry Amy Winehouse, but you’ll have to wait). Unfortunately, we can’t be so sure about this week’s Historical Badass. You see, our guy has this thing about cheating death.
Looks like an unholy cross between Steve Buscemi and Marilyn Manson
But first check out his picture.
Yeah, this dude was one crazy motherfucker. Look into those eyes and tell me you don’t see a gateway to nightmares and years of serious trauma therapy. I don’t think we ever get to see a dementor’s eyes, if it even has them. But if it does, that’s what I think they look like.
I think I’m going to need a drink before this article is over, but we’ll keep going for the moment.
*Deep breath*
Alright. Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born in 1869 in the small town of Pokrovskoye, Siberia. Upon exiting the womb, he reportedly cackled and wrote up a pact with the Devil then and there. His parents, understandably concerned, tried to enroll him in the local preschool, but historical texts tell us the effort stalled slightly when the school was inexplicably sucked into another dimension while little Cthulhu sat nearby baking muffins.
Years went by and the wee lad Grigori prospered, and by prospered, I mean got way scarier. Like the kid in that movie The Omen, or a teenage Tom Riddle, Rasputin seemed destined for a pale complexion and dead, soulless eyes with a presence that made small children cry and grown men shit themselves with terror.
Eventually, Rasputin joined a monastery and “found God”—I don’t know what god he found, but it sure wasn’t a happy one—at which point events elsewhere conspired to bring him into the limelight.
Rasputin modeling how to properly smize
As history informs us, the problem was hemophilia, but since today’s pharmaceutical clusterfuck of drugs was unavailable at the time, there wasn’t much that could be done. Making matters even more interesting, bleeding was a common treatment at the time. Yep. Perhaps the one thing that couldn’t possibly make things worse was being used to treat the Czar’s family.
Here it is expressed as a formula: Bleeding+Hemophilia=Lots of Dead People
Rasputin however, claimed to have the answer. And thanks to his deal with the Devil, he soon became a close confidant for the Czar’s family, especially Czar Nicholas’ wife, Alexandra, who grew to regard Rasputin as her closest adviser after he affected “miraculous” cures. She had so much belief in his powers that she believed God spoke through him.
You can guess how that went over.
His immense influence on the family, and thus on Russia’s ruling policies, was not well regarded by a number of men who thought they could do a far better job of fucking things up than Rasputin, so — doing what all Russian politicians do in a time of upheaval and doubt — they decided to kill the guy they felt was responsible.
Strangely, the animated Rasputin looks slightly more human than the real Rasputin did
It was then that Rasputin received a lovely dinner invitation from Prince Felix Yusupov, who totally wasn’t going to try to kill him. For some reason Old Grigori accepted the invitation and arrived wearing a batman cape. Taking him down to the cellar, the nobles fed Rasputin tons of food, all laced with cyanide, better known to us today as a rat poison.
Now, this would kill fucking anybody. Rasputin however, shrugged it off like nothing, all the while telling his favorite knock-knock jokes. They must have been bad ones to, because one guy got so pissed off that he shot Rasputin in the back.
The dude blinked less than even Dick Cheney
Was he dead?
Nope. The crazy fucker still kept trying to go after them, so they all grabbed clubs and gave him a prison-style beatdown. They then wrapped his body in a sheet and tossed it in the icy — actually, all rivers in Russia are icy — Neva River.
Days later, when Rasputin’s body was found, full of poison, bullet holes, and clubbing wounds, the mortician determined the cause of his death.
Take a guess about what finally killed this preposterously insane fucknut. No really, I’ll wait.
…
Yep. The cause of death was drowning. He had even broken out of the sheet and tried to swim… with four gunshot wounds and broken bones.
By the way, one of the shots was through his forehead. Yeah.
What. The. Fuck.
To be fair, autopsy reports differ, and several were done on Rasputin with different conclusions, but this is the one I’m going with because, frankly, it’s that badass.
Sherman Ave 
